He Yanxin (1939-2025) was the last natural inheritor of nushu, a women-only script from Jiangyong County in Hunan province, south-east China. She died on October 23rd 2025, aged 86.
Born in Heyuan village, tucked among the sandstone peaks of Jiangyong County, she learned nushu from her grandmother as a child. In the summer of 1949, aged ten, she would sit under a tree while her grandmother inscribed characters on her palm; she would sing each character and draw it in the sand with a twig. Her father had been killed by a rapacious landlord when she was still a baby, knocked to the ground and beaten until his blood ran out. With no man to sow rice for the family, she had to be married off at 19.
She refused the marriage ceremony and for a few years lived apart from her husband. When she finally moved to his house, her mother-in-law hovered in the kitchen criticising her cooking and complaining to her son, who then "served up the beating". Her husband had abandoned his studies and tried farming, while she hauled rocks in the mines. She brought up six children amid poverty and a hard marriage.
From the early 1980s, researchers began seeking her out. She initially denied all knowledge of the script. A Japanese researcher, Endo Orie, broke through her resistance by handing her a pen and paper on the doorstep. Clumsily at first, then with growing grace, she began drawing the characters. Ms Endo urged her to write her life story. One night alone at home while her husband was gravely ill in hospital, she began. For the next two decades she helped scholars research nushu and accepted the status of its last natural inheritor -- the last woman to have learned it within her family. She acquired a "nushu sister", Hu Xin, a young student whom she helped through both chanting exercises and a divorce.
She had deep misgivings about what nushu had become in the 21st century. Men had found uses for it as a tourist lure: in Jiangyong one could buy trinkets with misspelled nushu inscriptions and get a fan free with a bucket of fried chicken. An imposing nushu museum in Pumei village offered writing courses, but the songs had turned bland and pretty. No one, she felt, needed to understand the grief her grandmother had expressed while inscribing "the words of ants".
I went to a Grateful Dead Concert and they played for SEVEN hours. Great song.